Shostakovitch: sonata for cello and piano, Op. 40.
God, I love tuesdays.
Individual therapy followed by group therapy. I just love it. All that happiness and friendly camaraderie between the insane. It really perks me up.
The kitchenette of a hospital unit. Tatty sits curled in a chair. Enter fellow patient number 1.
Tatty: hey.
FP1: hello, how are you?
Tatty: pretty glum. You?
pause
FP1: Yup. Me too.
pause
Tatty: Christ. Do you want a cup of tea while I try and think of something interesting I've done this week?
FP1: Okay.
Tatty makes tea and as she does so a companionable silence is maintained.
Tatty: I can't think of anything I'm afraid... Oh... wait... I sat in the corner for a while and sulked.
FP1: I spoke to a new person on msn.
Tatty: yup. That does seem exciting in context, doesn't it?
Enter FP2
Tatty&FP1: how's your week been?
FP2: I'm feeling pretty grumpy.
Tatty&FP1: Yup.
FP2: but I ate a really nice coconut.
The coconut is then considered in great detail. We discuss coconuts We Have Eaten.
It's ever so boring being this kind of crazy. It's just like an awful lot of primary school wetbreak times, all melding into one another. You know- like you were expecting to be able to go and play football, but then it rained again so you have to sit inside feeling a bit pissed off with that kid who keeps trying to kick you. I got quite excited when they told me that I was suffering from "transient, stress-related paranoid ideation", which is a form of psychosis. I thought, brilliant, at last, some real action. It turns out that it just means that when I get a bit stressed I start thinking that people hate me. Sometimes I start thinking that animals and inanimate objects hate me. Occasionally I have conversations with people which I think happened and then it turns out they didn't, which is mildly embarassing. Oh, and once I thought I was hearing voices, but then it turned out I'd just left the radio on upstairs. Really, on a scale of one to exciting, that's pretty fucking dull. The whole thing is dull. That's the worst thing about it; the constant, knawing ache which is just so unexciting while at the same time filling up your whole mind. Like tooth-ache.
Individual therapy was Like Totally Jokes. I got lots of Brownie points for not having self-harmed all week and then lost them all again by admitting to having eaten a box of ibroprofen, accompanied, garcon, by a bottle of scotch. I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't even a very nice bottle of scotch. It was blended. On the other hand, they were real ibroprofen; not your own-brand Boots shit, so that sort of makes up for it. I don't usually own up to that sort of thing t therapists,; it's just rather embarassing, d'you see? But I am determined not to start lying to this one, because once I have started I wont stop until I am spinning a girls own annual version of my life and everyone is smiling at my seuccess apart from me. So I told her, and she asked why. I don't know why. It seemed like a jolly good idea at the time, and I find those little air-blisters that pills come in just about as compelling as bubble-wrap. You just want to Keep! On! Popping! Also, I have this really good theory that if they sell them in boxes of sixteen, then sixteen can't possibly be enough to in any way harm you, because if it was then small children could buy them thinking they were happy white vacuum packed smarties. Don't tell me that they just count on children not being that stupid and adults having self-restraint. They put nut allergy warnings on packets of nuts. (See, you thought I was going to say peanuts, didn't you, and that you could then cleverly point out that peanuts are LEGUMES, not nuts, but I saw through your little plan and didn't specify what kind of nuts. For I am clever. And I think ahead. Except in matters pertaining to my continued existence on this sainted planet). I don't know why I did it, and that is something which has always scared me about this whole maklarkey- that I could do myself permanent and severe damage and have no explanation better than- it seemed like a good idea at the time.
In fact, the best approximation to a reason for my stupid and pointless act of destruction- calculated, by the way, not to kill myself but just to make myself sleep for twelve hours and then feel like shit for a further twenty-four (an OD of ibroprofen makes your face prickle- did you know that?)- is that it was the boredom. I'm not feeling too well at the moment. I say that to people and they expect me to start talking in tounges or wandering around with my shoes on backwards. Actually, what it means is that I keep being a bit wierd at my friends, I find my thoughts turning rather irritatingly to ending my own life when I am meant to be thinking about the quickest way to get to Notting Hill Gate, I am overwhelmed by the prospect of housework, I can't stand the sight of my own face, and it's taken me three days to read a hundred pages of a fucking detective novel. It's really just quite fucking dull. So I thought I'd do something to take my mind off it. A little bit of entertainment for the chronically sad.
Most of the other women in group therapy are older than me. In them I see what could be my future, or what could have been my future if I was born twenty years earlier, or if I lived in a different place: DBT has only been developed in the last ten years and still isn't offered very widely in this country. In most places the old programme is still adherred to. Borderlines are trouble, they're manipulative, fraustrating and draining and they don't get better, so there's really no point trying. Also, a lot of them aren't very likeable (although I have to say that I've liked all the ones I've met). Therapist after therapist will try and help you and then, fraustated when you don't respond to the talking cure, will give up. Or you'll give up, because it isn't helping and you're bored of treading the same ground week after week. There will be drug therapy programmes started and abandoned. There will be hospitalisations. And then discharges. And then more hospitalisations. And people will look at you without much hope in their eyes, and A&E will patch you up and send you home and wait to see you again, and your doctors will sigh when they see your name, and your life will be one constant attempt to live in a world which you don't understand, and your life will be one long session of not being listened to after another, and your life will be a bit of a chaotic mess because that's what BPD is, and one in eight of you will kill yourselves. Because it is boring. And it isn't what any of us wanted to be when we grew up. But mostly because it is boring; it's so, fucking, tedious, and there doesn't seem to be much hope that it will ever be different, and no one else seems to have much hope for you either. I've seen it when I've been to casualty to get stitches. They look at me and they look at my notes, and they are awful nice after that, but in the hushed way you have with someone already marked out by death. They expect to see me again, and they expect that next time it will be worse.
I lost hope again for a bit this week and re-discovered my inner bored, damp, over-excited play-time child, and ate the damn pills. The tuesday of doom, although not spent in my favorite way, has given me a bit of my hope back. I like the people in my group. I like being able to make jokes about the whole thing to people who get the jokes, not because they are about something slightly taboo, but just because they are about our lives. Funny because true. I can throw my head back and laugh. And when I talk about my fears, people just nod and look a bit bored. I like that.
Individual therapy followed by group therapy. I just love it. All that happiness and friendly camaraderie between the insane. It really perks me up.
The kitchenette of a hospital unit. Tatty sits curled in a chair. Enter fellow patient number 1.
Tatty: hey.
FP1: hello, how are you?
Tatty: pretty glum. You?
pause
FP1: Yup. Me too.
pause
Tatty: Christ. Do you want a cup of tea while I try and think of something interesting I've done this week?
FP1: Okay.
Tatty makes tea and as she does so a companionable silence is maintained.
Tatty: I can't think of anything I'm afraid... Oh... wait... I sat in the corner for a while and sulked.
FP1: I spoke to a new person on msn.
Tatty: yup. That does seem exciting in context, doesn't it?
Enter FP2
Tatty&FP1: how's your week been?
FP2: I'm feeling pretty grumpy.
Tatty&FP1: Yup.
FP2: but I ate a really nice coconut.
The coconut is then considered in great detail. We discuss coconuts We Have Eaten.
It's ever so boring being this kind of crazy. It's just like an awful lot of primary school wetbreak times, all melding into one another. You know- like you were expecting to be able to go and play football, but then it rained again so you have to sit inside feeling a bit pissed off with that kid who keeps trying to kick you. I got quite excited when they told me that I was suffering from "transient, stress-related paranoid ideation", which is a form of psychosis. I thought, brilliant, at last, some real action. It turns out that it just means that when I get a bit stressed I start thinking that people hate me. Sometimes I start thinking that animals and inanimate objects hate me. Occasionally I have conversations with people which I think happened and then it turns out they didn't, which is mildly embarassing. Oh, and once I thought I was hearing voices, but then it turned out I'd just left the radio on upstairs. Really, on a scale of one to exciting, that's pretty fucking dull. The whole thing is dull. That's the worst thing about it; the constant, knawing ache which is just so unexciting while at the same time filling up your whole mind. Like tooth-ache.
Individual therapy was Like Totally Jokes. I got lots of Brownie points for not having self-harmed all week and then lost them all again by admitting to having eaten a box of ibroprofen, accompanied, garcon, by a bottle of scotch. I'm ashamed to say that it wasn't even a very nice bottle of scotch. It was blended. On the other hand, they were real ibroprofen; not your own-brand Boots shit, so that sort of makes up for it. I don't usually own up to that sort of thing t therapists,; it's just rather embarassing, d'you see? But I am determined not to start lying to this one, because once I have started I wont stop until I am spinning a girls own annual version of my life and everyone is smiling at my seuccess apart from me. So I told her, and she asked why. I don't know why. It seemed like a jolly good idea at the time, and I find those little air-blisters that pills come in just about as compelling as bubble-wrap. You just want to Keep! On! Popping! Also, I have this really good theory that if they sell them in boxes of sixteen, then sixteen can't possibly be enough to in any way harm you, because if it was then small children could buy them thinking they were happy white vacuum packed smarties. Don't tell me that they just count on children not being that stupid and adults having self-restraint. They put nut allergy warnings on packets of nuts. (See, you thought I was going to say peanuts, didn't you, and that you could then cleverly point out that peanuts are LEGUMES, not nuts, but I saw through your little plan and didn't specify what kind of nuts. For I am clever. And I think ahead. Except in matters pertaining to my continued existence on this sainted planet). I don't know why I did it, and that is something which has always scared me about this whole maklarkey- that I could do myself permanent and severe damage and have no explanation better than- it seemed like a good idea at the time.
In fact, the best approximation to a reason for my stupid and pointless act of destruction- calculated, by the way, not to kill myself but just to make myself sleep for twelve hours and then feel like shit for a further twenty-four (an OD of ibroprofen makes your face prickle- did you know that?)- is that it was the boredom. I'm not feeling too well at the moment. I say that to people and they expect me to start talking in tounges or wandering around with my shoes on backwards. Actually, what it means is that I keep being a bit wierd at my friends, I find my thoughts turning rather irritatingly to ending my own life when I am meant to be thinking about the quickest way to get to Notting Hill Gate, I am overwhelmed by the prospect of housework, I can't stand the sight of my own face, and it's taken me three days to read a hundred pages of a fucking detective novel. It's really just quite fucking dull. So I thought I'd do something to take my mind off it. A little bit of entertainment for the chronically sad.
Most of the other women in group therapy are older than me. In them I see what could be my future, or what could have been my future if I was born twenty years earlier, or if I lived in a different place: DBT has only been developed in the last ten years and still isn't offered very widely in this country. In most places the old programme is still adherred to. Borderlines are trouble, they're manipulative, fraustrating and draining and they don't get better, so there's really no point trying. Also, a lot of them aren't very likeable (although I have to say that I've liked all the ones I've met). Therapist after therapist will try and help you and then, fraustated when you don't respond to the talking cure, will give up. Or you'll give up, because it isn't helping and you're bored of treading the same ground week after week. There will be drug therapy programmes started and abandoned. There will be hospitalisations. And then discharges. And then more hospitalisations. And people will look at you without much hope in their eyes, and A&E will patch you up and send you home and wait to see you again, and your doctors will sigh when they see your name, and your life will be one constant attempt to live in a world which you don't understand, and your life will be one long session of not being listened to after another, and your life will be a bit of a chaotic mess because that's what BPD is, and one in eight of you will kill yourselves. Because it is boring. And it isn't what any of us wanted to be when we grew up. But mostly because it is boring; it's so, fucking, tedious, and there doesn't seem to be much hope that it will ever be different, and no one else seems to have much hope for you either. I've seen it when I've been to casualty to get stitches. They look at me and they look at my notes, and they are awful nice after that, but in the hushed way you have with someone already marked out by death. They expect to see me again, and they expect that next time it will be worse.
I lost hope again for a bit this week and re-discovered my inner bored, damp, over-excited play-time child, and ate the damn pills. The tuesday of doom, although not spent in my favorite way, has given me a bit of my hope back. I like the people in my group. I like being able to make jokes about the whole thing to people who get the jokes, not because they are about something slightly taboo, but just because they are about our lives. Funny because true. I can throw my head back and laugh. And when I talk about my fears, people just nod and look a bit bored. I like that.
posted by tattybluetrees at 1:36 PM
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